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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Pano3D: Unified 3D Reconstruction and Panoptic Segmentation

Recent advances in 3D feedforward reconstruction neural networks have achieved remarkable success in dense reconstruction from images without any camera parameters. Yet, equipping these models with robust semantic understanding remains an open problem. Here we introduce an approach that performs 3D reconstruction and 3D panoptic segmentation in a unified framework. We build on existing 3D reconstruction models and augment them with a set-based mask decoder. The approach is jointly trained with a geometric and semantic loss, which are shown to be mutually beneficial. More precisely, the features are initialized from the geometric information and then finetuned to capture jointly geometry and semantics. We demonstrate the generality of our approach by successfully applying our framework both to online and all-to-all attention reconstruction backbones. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in 3D panoptic segmentation across ScanNet, ScanNet200, and ScanNet++ datasets. Ablation studies show that such joint training of a unified model equips 3D feedforward reconstruction neural networks with panoptic segmentation and yields mutually beneficial improvements.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

A Global Health Quality Improvement Project: Enhancing Cervical Cancer Awareness and screening in Nigeria

Background Cervical cancer remains a significant global public health challenge, ranking as the fourth most common cancer among women worldwide. According to The World Health Organization (WHO) 604,000 women were diagnosed with cervical cancer globally in 2020, with over 342,000 deaths amongst this group [1]. Despite its high mortality, cervical cancer is largely preventable through early detection and vaccination against human papillomavirus (HPV), which causes nearly all cases of cervical cancer [1,2] In Nigeria, it is the second most common cancer among women in Nigeria and a leading cause of cancer-related deaths, with low screening rates exacerbating late diagnoses and poor outcomes [1]. Despite global commitments to elimination with Pap smear screening and HPV vaccination, less than 10% of women in Nigeria have undergone screening due to misconceptions, stigma, and limited awareness. Educational interventions may improve awareness and promote screening behaviors. This global health quality improvement (QI) project aimed to enhance cervical cancer awareness and increase Pap smear uptake at the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Clinic in Abuja, Nigeria. Methods In November 2024, we conducted a health education intervention at the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) through a structured educational session for male and female CBN staff members. The session focused on cervical cancer prevention, risk factors, and screening guidelines. Additionally, cervical cancer awareness was raised via email, social media, and electronic bulletin board. Participants completed pre and post-interventions surveys assessing cervical cancer knowledge across 10 key items and demographic characteristics. Pap smear uptake was assessed using the CBN clinic records for three months before and after the intervention. Institutional approval was obtained from CBN and external institutional review board approval was not required. Results 188 participants attended the health education session with 124 survey responses (70 pre-event, 54 post-event). Participants were mostly women aged 30-39. Post-intervention, eight of ten survey questions showed improved knowledge, with five demonstrating statistically significant gains: understanding Pap smear frequency (p

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Detecting Explanatory Insufficiency in Learned Representations: A Framework for Representational Vigilance

arXiv:2606.13172v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learned representations are central to modern machine learning and are commonly evaluated through predictive performance, robustness, uncertainty estimation, or generalization. However, a learned representation may remain operationally successful while progressively failing to organize persistent residual structures that are not fully captured by conventional evaluation metrics. This article introduces VER, the Vigilant Evaluator of Representations, a conceptual framework for monitoring representational adequacy in learned representations. VER does not propose a new learning algorithm, loss function, or model architecture. Instead, it formalizes a diagnostic process through which persistent residual structures may be identified, analyzed, and interpreted as potential indicators of explanatory insufficiency. The framework distinguishes representational inadequacy from ordinary prediction error, uncertainty, noise, and distribution shift. It introduces a monitoring sequence based on representation identification, explanatory-domain delimitation, residual-structure detection, explanatory-resistance evaluation, and vigilance signaling. VER is intended as a contribution to representation diagnostics in machine learning. Its objective is not to replace existing evaluation methods but to complement them by treating representational adequacy as an explicit object of inquiry. A path toward empirical evaluation through representational-vigilance benchmarks is also outlined.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Million-scale multimodal pollen microscopy with expert-guided foundation models

Automated pollen identification from microscopy remains a bottleneck in aerobiology, palaeoecology and biodiversity monitoring, because scalable systems must generalise across specimen preparation, scanner settings and geographic origins while retaining palynological interpretability. To address this gap, we present a million-scale multimodal pollen microscopy resource, Pollen AI Atlas, assembled from pure-species whole-slide bright-field images spanning four geographic origins, four scanner settings and 46 taxon labels across 31 botanical families. Seeded by one manually selected exemplar per source slide, token-level mining and filtering produced 1,511,390 released grain detections with 99.6\% proposal precision in expert-curated test regions. Each detection was paired with machine-generated grain-level morphological captions from five open-weight vision-language models, guided by expert-verified palynological anchors, yielding structured descriptions of aperture systems, wall ornamentation, shape and size. Among the evaluated models, Gemma4 provided the most controlled primary caption set, combining tight length control, no leakage and the strongest text-retrieval performance. Baseline benchmarks with frozen visual features reached 88.16\% top-1 accuracy, while cross-regional retrieval showed that caption-derived text embeddings remained robust when image similarity degraded (mAP@20 0.811 versus 0.262). Released data, annotations, captions, splits, code, and weights provide a benchmark for pollen recognition, cross-regional domain adaptation and domain-specific multimodal microscopy learning.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

findsylls: A Language-Agnostic Toolkit for Syllable-Level Speech Tokenization and Embedding

Syllable-level units offer compact and linguistically meaningful representations for spoken language modeling and unsupervised word discovery, but research on syllabification remains fragmented across disparate implementations, datasets, and evaluation protocols. We introduce findsylls, a modular, language-agnostic toolkit that unifies classical syllable detectors and end-to-end syllabifiers under a common interface for syllable segmentation, embedding extraction, and multi-granular evaluation. The toolkit implements and standardizes widely used methods (e.g., Sylber, VG-HuBERT) and allows their components to be recombined, enabling controlled comparisons of representations, algorithms, and token rates. We demonstrate findsylls on English and Spanish corpora and on new hand-annotated data from Kono, an underdocumented Central Mande language, illustrating how a single framework can support reproducible syllable-level experiments across both high-resource and under-resourced settings.

06.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Contactless Respiratory Monitoring on Heterogeneous Mobile Robots: A Multimodal Edge-Computing Framework

Respiratory-rate (RR) monitoring is a critical component of remote triage and victim assessment in emergency response, disaster recovery, and infectious-disease scenarios, where minimizing physical contact can reduce responder risk and improve operational safety. However, field deployment of contactless RR monitoring remains challenging due to variable illumination, posture changes, platform heterogeneity, and the impracticality of wearable sensors in hazardous environments. In this paper, we present a modality-adaptive contactless RR monitoring framework for heterogeneous mobile robots with onboard edge computing. The proposed system combines brightness-adaptive sensor selection across RGB, thermal, near-infrared (NIR), and low-light cameras, keypoint-guided chest ROI extraction for posture-robust monitoring, and a signal-quality-index (SQI)-based filtering mechanism for reliable respiratory estimation. We implement and evaluate the framework on three robotic platforms spanning quadruped and wheeled locomotion and multiple edge-computing architectures. Experiments conducted across diverse lighting conditions, subject poses, and robot-to-subject distances demonstrate that the framework generalizes across platforms without per-platform algorithmic retuning, while revealing modality-specific operational boundaries. RGB provides the broadest coverage up to 8m, NIR remains effective up to 6m, thermal is reliable only at short range, and low-light sensing supports monitoring in complete darkness up to 8m. Overall, the results demonstrate the feasibility of multimodal contactless RR monitoring on mobile robots and support its use as a foundation for autonomous triage and victim assessment in hazardous search-and-rescue settings.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

An integrative multi-omics framework identifies epigenetic dysregulation of HAND2 as a potential primary driver of impaired enteric neural crest cell differentiation in Hirschsprung Disease

Hirschsprung disease (HSCR) is a congenital neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by segmental aganglionosis due to impaired developmental processes of enteric neural crest cells (NCCs). Despite being the leading genetic cause of functional intestinal obstruction in early childhood, HSCR represents a paradigmatic challenge in precision medicine: its multifactorial etiology, complex gene-environment interactions and limited resolution of single-modality analyses have long hindered mechanistic understanding and therapeutic translation. Here, we applied an integrative multi-omics approach combining genetic, phenotypic, epigenomic and transcriptomic analyses of matched ganglionic and aganglionic formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) patient tissues, complemented by patient-specific in vitro models. Beyond established genetic contributors, our integrative approach reveals novel regulatory pathways predominantly affecting enteric NCC differentiation, with convergent evidence pointing to epigenetic dysregulation as a primary disease mechanism. Notably, we identified over 1,300 differentially methylated positions between ganglionic and aganglionic FFPE samples, with HAND2 emerging as a key candidate due to multiple hypermethylated sites and consistently reduced expression levels in aganglionic tissues and in vitro models, suggesting a potential role in HSCR pathophysiology. We propose that our multi-omics approach offers a powerful and comprehensive framework for dissecting disease mechanisms. Beyond advancing biological understanding, this strategy holds promise for paving the way for molecularly informed patient stratification and supporting the development of personalized treatment and postoperative management strategies.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Geometry of Reason: Spectral Signatures of Valid Mathematical Reasoning

Verifying whether a language model is genuinely reasoning or pattern-matching remains an open problem: learned verifiers are expensive, and output-based heuristics are brittle. We show that valid mathematical reasoning induces a measurable, training-free spectral signature in transformer attention. By treating each attention matrix as a weighted token graph, we extract four diagnostics: Fiedler value, High-Frequency Energy Ratio (HFER), spectral entropy, and smoothness, that require no learned parameters. Experiments across seven models from four architectural families yield effect sizes up to Cohen's $d = 3.30$ ($p < 10^{-116}$), enabling $85$–$96\%$ single-threshold classification accuracy. Two findings sharpen the interpretation. First, Platonic validity: the spectral signal tracks logical coherence rather than compiler acceptance, proofs rejected for timeouts or missing imports are correctly classified as valid, a distinction confirmed by a manual audit ($\kappa = 0.82$, $n = 51$). Second, architectural determinism: Sliding Window Attention shifts the discriminative feature from HFER to smoothness ($d = 2.09$, $p < 10^{-48}$), showing that attention design governs which spectral channel encodes reasoning quality. Causal ablation confirms the signature traces induction-head circuits. The method generalises to informal chain-of-thought ($d = 0.78$, $p < 10^{-3}$), and in proof search, HFER reranking improves Best-of-16 Pass@1 by $+4.4$–$6.6$\%, matching $98\%$ of the AUC of fully supervised probes with zero labels. Spectral graph analysis is a principled, architecture-aware primitive for reasoning verification.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Scratched Lenses, Shifted Depth: Passive Camera-Side Optical Attacks

Physical adversarial attacks on vision systems are typically studied through scene manipulation, such as adversarial patches or projections, where the adversary controls what the camera observes. Camera-side attacks using stickers or auxiliary optics have also been explored, but they treat attacks as image-space perturbations from designed patterns. This misses how physical imperfections interact with scene-dependent lighting and optics. We identify a threat: passive lens-side damage that is persistent yet trigger-conditioned, producing optical artifacts that bias geometric inference under particular visual conditions. We instantiate this threat through Scratch-induced Lens Adversarial Streak Hijacking SLASH, a physical-world attack caused by small scratches on a camera lens or protective cover. Scratches interact with bright light sources and specular reflections to create structured streak artifacts that distort depth cues. Since the perturbation is fixed in the optical path but triggered by the scene, it is both persistent and selective. We formulate the attack in optical space, model the scratch pattern as a trigger-conditioned optical channel, and optimize one fixed configuration across diverse viewing conditions. We evaluate SLASH on monocular depth estimation and monocular 3D object detection in digital and real-world settings. Under the fixed-scratch constraint, directional depth shifts reach up to 32% relative error for monocular depth estimation, with consistent effects on monocular 3D object detection. Physical experiments confirm transfer to real camera recordings, inducing depth shifts above the model's natural prediction baseline. These findings reveal an attack surface where benign-looking hardware imperfections act as latent, scene-triggered adversarial mechanisms, challenging assumptions about physical robustness and motivating defenses for secure vision systems.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Multi-Agent Reasoning with Adaptive Worker Allocation for Stance Detection

Stance detection requires identifying an author's position toward a target, often from short-form texts where stance is implicit, indirect, or rhetorically framed. Although large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on this task, single-pass prompting can be brittle when multiple interpretations are plausible. Existing aggregation strategies, such as majority voting or self-consistency, improve robustness by combining labels, but they discard the intermediate reasoning needed to resolve conflicting interpretations. We introduce a multi-agent reasoning framework with adaptive worker allocation for stance detection that shifts aggregation from label-level voting to reasoning-level synthesis. The framework employs a Manager-Worker architecture in which a Manager adaptively allocates a variable number of Worker agents based on input complexity. Each Worker analyzes the input from a distinct perspective and produces a reasoning-only explanation without emitting a stance label; the Manager then synthesizes these explanations to produce the final prediction. We evaluate the proposed framework on SemEval-2016, P-Stance, and COVID-19 Stance using Llama, Mistral, and Gemini. Results show that the framework yields the largest gains on implicit and context-dependent stance cases, achieving 86.07 Macro-F1 on COVID-19 and 82.90 on SemEval-2016, while remaining competitive on more explicit stance datasets such as P-Stance. These findings suggest that adaptive reasoning-level aggregation is most beneficial when stance cannot be reliably inferred from surface cues alone.

11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Martingale Solutions to a Stochastic Keller-Segel System with nonlocal Source and Super-linear Noise

arXiv:2606.11774v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Global nonnegative martingale solutions are shown to exist for a stochastic Keller-Segel system with a nonlocal Fisher-KPP source and super-linear multiplicative noise. The result is obtained for nonnegative initial data with no smallness assumption, provided that the nonlocal source term is dominant. The main difficulty stems from the absence of a coercive structure and the super-linear nature of the noise. An additional cut-off with finite L^2 norm in the classical Galerkin method is added to establish a well-posed approximation problem. Moreover, due to the nonlocal Fisher-KPP structure, it is necessary to prove the positivity of the approximating solution in order to obtain uniform estimates. In the compactness arguments, the usual tightness argument in the framework of Hilbert spaces cannot be directly applied to the uniform estimates obtained in this paper. As a result, we develop a more general version of the compactness argument and tightness criterion, presented in the appendix, which will be applied throughout the paper. This allows for the global existence of nonnegative martingale solutions to be derived from Jakubowski's version of the Skorokhod Theorem, along with a thorough discussion of the convergence properties.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Semantic Segmentation of Node and Edge Diagrams for Assistive Technology

In this paper, we present a novel set of related models for semantic segmentation of node-link diagrams. These diagrams are frequently used to represent mathematical graphs, relationships between concepts, and flowcharts. Such diagrams are difficult to access non-visually; while some assistive interfaces have been designed for node-link diagrams, they rely upon a machine-readable representation of the diagram, whereas such diagrams will generally be made available as bitmap images. Our compact deep learning models show excellent quantitative and qualitative performance on a large synthetic dataset of node-link diagrams, reaching per-pixel accuracy over 93\%.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Rethinking Psychometric Evaluation of LLMs: When and Why Self-Reports Predict Behavior

Anticipating LLM behavioral tendencies from low-cost psychometric probes is critical for safe deployment, but only if self-reports (SR) reliably predict behavior. Recent work documented substantial SR-behavior dissociation in LLMs, but relied on broad personality traits (Big 5) that predict specific behaviors weakly, even in humans. Furthermore, the isolation of conversational sessions combined with weak context matching left open whether LLMs truly lack coherence or whether the conditions needed to detect such coherence were not met. We contrast Big 5 with the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), which measures intention targeted to a specific behavior and predicts human behavior substantially better than broad traits. We run experiments across four behavioral tasks and 11 frontier LLMs, while also varying session context and identity induction. We find that SR-behavior coherence exists but is selective. 1) Within a shared conversation, the Theory of Planned Behavior reaches human-level coherence; Big 5 does not. 2) Across separate conversations, coherence survives only for behaviors anchored outside the immediate prompt, such as implicit bias shaped by training, and collapses when behavior is strongly primed by context, as with sycophancy. 3) Persona prompting makes self-reports more consistent across conversations, but does not bring behavior into alignment. These findings suggest that coarse personality frameworks, such as Big 5 may not be the best tools for testing deployment behavior. More task- and behavior-specific instruments are needed, and even these must be evaluated across tasks and contexts.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Evaluating Prompting-Based Defenses Against Domain-Camouflaged Injection Attacks

Authors:

Domain-camouflaged injection attacks embed malicious instructions in retrieved content using domain-appropriate vocabulary, evading standard detectors that rely on syntactic injection markers. When detection fails, practitioners need to know which defense architectures reduce attack success. We evaluate five prompting-based defenses (spotlighting, paraphrasing, prompt sandwiching, and two combinations) against domain-camouflaged injection across three model families (Claude Haiku, Llama 3.1 8B, Gemini 2.0 Flash) and three deployment domains (financial, legal, general) using 3,510 trials. Paraphrasing retrieved content before agent processing is the most consistently effective defense in this benchmark, reducing camouflage attack success rate by 55-84\% depending on model, and achieves lower attack success rates than our Llama Guard 4 configuration on every model tested. Defense effectiveness is strongly model-dependent: spotlighting halves attack success on Claude Haiku but provides no benefit on Llama 3.1 8B. Financial domain deployments face the highest residual risk at 26-33\% baseline attack success rate, with no prompting-based defense fully eliminating the threat on weaker models. These results provide the first systematic evaluation of prompting-based defenses specifically against camouflage-class injection attacks and establish benchmark-based recommendations for practitioners. All tasks use synthetically constructed professional documents; whether these benchmark rankings generalize to real enterprise documents remains an open question.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Optimizing Incomplete, Large-Scale and Sparse Multi-Graph Matching in Bioimaging

Multi-graph matching is a fundamental problem in computer vision. Our work is motivated by a challenging application in bioimaging, where dozens or even hundreds of 3D microscopy images of worms must be brought into correspondence. Existing datasets do not cover this large-scale regime, and virtually all existing methods are inapplicable because they assume a complete or dense problem setting. To support further research, our first contribution is a new large-scale dataset based on problem instances from bioimaging. Our second contribution is a comprehensive analysis of the two main multi-graph matching paradigms: direct and permutation synchronization-based formulations. We argue, in part by proof, that practical large-scale methods must explicitly address problem sparsity and incompleteness. Since standard permutation synchronization approaches fail in this setting, we further introduce a sparse permutation synchronization paradigm. Our final contribution is GREEDA, a general method for sparse and incomplete problems that can be instantiated across cost orders and paradigms. While our paper focuses on objective functions up to quadratic order, GREEDA is inherently generalizable to arbitrary orders. On larger, sparse instances, GREEDA outperforms competing methods in both objective value and runtime. For example, for moderately-sized problems based on 30 worm images GREEDA produces a high-quality solution within 2 minutes, whereas competitors require at least half an hour and yield far worse results. On smaller dense problems, GREEDA remains on par with leading methods while being an order of magnitude faster.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Data Augmentations for Data-Constrained Language Model Pretraining

As AI labs approach a data ceiling where compute capacity outpaces the rate of new high-quality text generation, language model pretraining is shifting toward a data-constrained, compute-abundant regime that demands productive multi-epoch training on fixed corpora. Standard autoregressive (AR) pretraining overfits severely in this setting, reaching its optimum early and then continuously deteriorating. We investigate data augmentation as a regularizer to mitigate this overfitting and enable productive training for hundreds of epochs on the same data. We introduce three orthogonal categories of augmentation for AR pretraining: token-level noise (masking, random replacement), sequence permutations (right-to-left prediction, Fill-in-the-Middle), and target offset prediction ($x_{t+i}$ for $i > 1$). Through systematic ablations, we find that individual augmentations delay overfitting and lower validation loss relative to the baseline, with random token replacement achieving the best minimum loss among individual methods. Combining augmentation categories further lowers the minimum validation loss. Our experiments demonstrate that data augmentations mitigate AR pretraining's data inefficiency and offer a promising solution to the data-constrained regime. All code and data are available at https://github.com/michaelchen-lab/data-augmentations-for-pretraining

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Retell, Reward, Repeat: Reinforcement Learning for Narrative Theory-Informed Story Retelling

Counterfactual story retelling exposes LLM shortcomings in constrained narrative solution spaces where they can no longer rely on recalling memorised training data. Ground-truth-based post-training, such as SFT, fails to teach LLMs how to generate logical and rational narrative events. In this paper, we introduce Retell, Reward, Repeat (RRR), an RL-based pipeline synthesising Structuralist Narratology with scalar narrativity to teach storytelling structure. We extend the TimeTravel dataset with human-annotated stages of narrative equilibrium to evaluate reward models. By using d-RLAIF, RRR derives training signals from the narrativity of textual features without the need for reference outputs. Evaluations demonstrate that RRR-trained LLMs outperform few-shot and SFT baselines in logic, rationality, and completeness, with output quality additionally validated by blind human preference. Relying on a small, query-only dataset, RRR provides a linguistically grounded, cost-effective post-training mechanism for storytelling–a domain currently lacking effective post-training methods. RRR highlights the continued relevance of integrating established linguistic theories into contemporary NLP.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Relational Retrieval: Leveraging Known-Novel Interactions for Generalized Category Discovery

In this study, we tackle Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) via a Relational Retrieval perspective, explicitly coupling labeled and unlabeled data through bidirectional knowledge transfer. While existing methods treat these sources separately, missing valuable interaction opportunities, we propose Relational Pattern Consistency (RPC) that enables mutual enhancement. RPC employs One-vs-All classifiers for soft ID/OOD decomposition, then introduces two mechanisms: (i) for known-class preservation, we transfer semantic behavioral alignment; (ii) for category discovery, we leverage the insight that samples from the same category maintain invariant relationships with known-class prototypes, transforming unreliable pseudo-labeling into well-defined relational pattern matching. This bidirectional design allows labeled data to guide unlabeled learning while discovering novel categories through their collective relational signatures. Extensive experiments demonstrate RPC achieves state-of-the-art performance on both generic and fine-grained benchmarks.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Transformers Learn the Mestre-Nagao Heuristic

arXiv:2606.15036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We train a two-layer transformer encoder to classify rational elliptic curves $E/\mathbb{Q}$ of conductor $\leq 10000$ as either rank 0 or rank 1 from the first 128 normalized Frobenius traces. We achieve >99% accuracy on both classes, and accuracy is essentially unchanged on test curves with no isogeny or quadratic-twist relative in the training set. We then apply techniques from mechanistic interpretability such as attention analysis, linear probing, activation patching, logit attribution, and neuron-level circuit analysis to reverse-engineer the algorithm the (centroid in function space) model learned. We find that a sparse circuit of 20 out of 512 layer-1 MLP neurons is sufficient for rank prediction under a linear probe with an AUROC of 0.992 at plateau, implementing a push-pull detector architecture of rank-0 and rank-1 detectors with a one-sided readout. However, we notice that the model has sub-optimal readout problems indicating a mismatch in rank-order between the readout pathway and the discriminative circuit. Critically, the learned input weights of the top discriminating neuron match the Mestre-Nagao sum heuristic weights $\log(p)/(p\cdot \log{B})$ with a Spearman coefficient $r = 0.997$ and Pearson coefficient $r = 0.952$: the model has learnt a result from analytic number theory from the Frobenius trace data alone. We additionally find that all 50 independently trained models concentrate CLS attention on prime positions at 2-50$\times$ the rate of composite positions. The CLS embedding encodes $\log{L(E,1)}$ with $R^2 = 0.962\pm 0.011$ across the 50 models (after controlling for the conductor). Activation patching analysis reveals that attention weights are dissociated from causal information flow. Additionally, the 50 solutions from training are near-identical in function space (with pairwise agreement $>$98.8%) despite large weight space barriers.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Recursive Scaling in Masked Diffusion Models

arXiv:2606.18022v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for sequence generation. Scaling MDMs is conventionally achieved by increasing the parameter count or the number of denoising steps. We introduce Recursive Masked Diffusion Models (R-MDMs), which add recursive depth as a third scaling axis by repeatedly applying the same denoising transformer within each diffusion step. Recursion enables iterative refinement of the output through parameter reuse, increasing effective model depth without increasing parameter count. Across structured generation tasks, including Sudoku and Countdown, we show that R-MDMs achieve substantially improved parameter efficiency: a model with $L$ recursive iterations often matches the performance of non-recursive baselines with roughly $L\times$ more parameters. Moreover, recursive refinement can partially substitute for additional denoising steps, allowing recursive models to reach the same generation quality with fewer forward passes at inference time. These results suggest that recursive depth is a practically useful scaling mechanism for MDMs, improving both parameter efficiency and the allocation of test-time compute.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Bridging Modal Isolation in Interleaved Thinking: Supervising Modality Transitions via Stepwise Reinforcement

Interleaved thinking, where a unified multimodal model alternates between textual reasoning and visual generation, has shown promise on spatial and physical tasks. However, in complex long-chain scenarios, we identify a fundamental failure mode: generated images diverge from the textual context while subsequent text ignores the visual evidence, causing the two modalities to alternate without genuinely informing each other. We term this Modal Isolation and attribute it to compounding information loss at modality boundaries. We decompose each reasoning cycle into atomic operations and define modality transition loss, quantifying cross-modal hallucination (text-to-image) and visual utilization deficit (image-to-text) at each boundary. We propose MoTiF (Modality Tiransition Fidelity), a two-stage training framework that directly optimizes these transitions: Reflective SFT trains the model to detect and recover from erroneous visual outputs; Flow-GRPO improves image generation fidelity via reinforcement learning. All training signals in MoTiF derive from transition-level fidelity rather than end-task accuracy. Across four visual puzzle benchmarks, this transition-level supervision substantially improves both cross-modal coherence and final task accuracy. The results demonstrate that effective interleaved reasoning requires explicit structural supervision at modality boundaries, not merely scaling or end-task optimization.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Resourcefulness of non-classical continuous-variable quantum gates

arXiv:2410.09226v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In continuous-variable quantum computation, identifying key elements that enable a quantum computational advantage is a long-standing issue. Starting from the standard results on the necessity of Wigner negativity, we develop a comprehensive and versatile approach in which the techniques of $(s)$-ordered quasiprobabilities are exploited to provide rigorous statements on the simulability of photonic quantum circuits consisting of previously characterized gates and thereby identifying the contribution of each quantum gate to the potential achievement of quantum computational advantage. This is achieved by means of an analysis of the so-called transfer function, allowing us to highlight the resourcefulness of a gate set. As such this technique can be straightforwardly applied to current continuous-variables quantum circuits, while also constraining the tolerable amount of losses above which any potential quantum advantage can be ruled out. We use $(s)$-ordered quasiprobability distributions on phase-space to capture the non-classical features in the protocol, and focus our technique entirely on the ordering parameter $s$. This allows us to highlight the resourcefulness and robustness to loss of a universal set of unitary gates comprising three distinct Gaussian gates and any non-Gaussian unitary gate, providing important insight on the role of non-Gaussianity.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Hierarchical Multi-Modal Retrieval for Knowledge-Grounded News Image Captioning

Traditional image captioning methods often struggle to generate comprehensive, context-rich descriptions, especially for details not directly observable from visual cues. To overcome this, we propose a novel retrieval-augmented image captioning framework that generates captions with deeper insights, such as object attributes, event context, and underlying significance, by leveraging external knowledge. Our approach features a hierarchical multi-modal article retrieval mechanism that moves beyond monolithic text entities. This retrieval considers article structure-aware features, including weighted textual components (e.g., headlines, body sections) and visual placement patterns, alongside multi-faceted similarity computations (content–visual, visual–visual, and discourse positioning). A subsequent contextual relevance refinement stage further enhances the retrieved information. The retrieved articles then serve as the knowledge base for caption generation: first, a VLM generates a concise image description; second, we segment relevant information from the retrieved articles based on this description; and finally, an LLM utilizes both the description and extracted knowledge to generate a comprehensive, contextually detailed caption. We participated in the ACM Multimedia EVENTA 2025 Challenge and achieved 5th place with an overall score of 0.2824 on the private test set of the OpenEvent-V1 dataset. Source code is publicly released at https://github.com/mf0212/EVENTA-Challange.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Fodor and Pylyshyn's Systematicity Challenge Still Stands

The recent successes of neural networks producing human-like language have caused significant stir in cognitive science, with many researchers arguing that classical puzzles about human cognition and challenges to artificial intelligence are being solved by neural networks. A notable case is the argument from systematicity due to Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn, argues that humans display systematic biconditional dependencies. For example, someone can understand the sentence "John saw Mary" just in case that they understand the sentence "Mary saw John." Symbolic systems explain this systematicity of language and thought, while neural networks offer no immediate explanation. Several recent articles argue that this challenge has now been met by neural networks. In particular, Brenden Lake and Marco Baroni argue that their meta-learning for compositionality protocol matches and perhaps explains human systematicity. We demonstrate that these conclusions are premature. Among other results, we found that their model struggles to learn rules that are even slightly out of distribution compared to their training data. Furthermore, the model behaves unsystematically even on many within-distribution problems. We conclude that Fodor and Pylyshyn's challenge to neural networks remains unmet.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Towards Geostrategic Critical Minerals and Materials Resilience: Secure Supply-Chain and Criticality Analyses for Quantum Technologies in Arctic and Space Environments

arXiv:2605.02926v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This manuscript maps secure-supply and criticality risks for quantum technologies deployed in extreme environments, linking upstream critical minerals and materials (CMMs) to downstream system performance, continuity of security, and mission assurance. It adopts a reproducible "Critical Level I" screening method to identify materials whose supply concentration, essentiality, and limited mitigatability can create bottlenecks for quantum deployment. The analysis is structured around two use cases: (i) niobium as a key input for superconducting quantum computing and related manufacturing and toolchain dependencies; and (ii) space-qualified superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs), alongside adjacent single-photon detector platforms such as SPADs, where radiation, thermal cycling, vibration, and electromagnetic interference can degrade device metrics and, in communications settings, threaten continuity of security. The manuscript further situates these dependencies within U.S.-China strategic competition over critical materials, refining capacity, export controls, and overseas mineral acquisitions, while also connecting them to standards-first governance, post-quantum cryptography migration, and the emerging security logic of quantum networking. It argues that static national critical-minerals lists are insufficient for mission-relevant quantum technology and proposes a dedicated Quantum Criticality and Critical Minerals (QCCM) dashboard as a living decision-support tool for tracking concentration, substitutability, qualification bottlenecks, stockpiling gaps, and geopolitical stress signals across quantum platforms. The paper concludes with implications for substitution, diversification, stockpiling, shielding, qualification-by-design, and standards-aligned governance to support secure, sustained, and mission-relevant quantum deployment.